Good morning everybody, so Ive posted about my starting problem before and you guys gave me some great things to check. I changed the battery, I changed the spark plug, I got a new Raptor petcock, but I cant seem to get it to fire up yet.

Last week I was talking with our engineer at work, and he brought up the carb. Now when I got my Savage, my friend had driven it for a week, then parked it to put on a BCB kit. When he parked it, I know he didnt drain the carb or anything like that (mostly because he doesnt really care about maintenance, just riding lol) so my engineer buddy said to take it off the bike and clean it. "You have ignition, you have fuel with a new petcock, the only other thing youre missing is the mix of fuel and air leading to ignition."

I never though about taking the carb off because from what I had heard it was a SOB to get off and clean. But after sitting in my garage, reading my manuel and spending 5 minutes looking at it, I finally took the carb off the bike! And it wasnt hard at all! (I was pleasantly surprised). When I got it off the bike, I turned it over and yellow gas poured out one of the California Emission tubes. Ive never seen yellow gas (or what I assumed to be gas) before. What could that be?

Now my real question to you guys is, with the limited mechanical knowledge that I have, could I be the one to take it apart, repair it and clean it? Or is that a job for a shop to do? I found a shop here in Colorado Springs that works on Suzuki carbs, but if I can save some money, and learn more about my bike by doing it myself, then I would rather do that. But if its something that a newbie shouldnt be touching, then Ill take it to that shop and have them rebuild and clean it. Any thoughts?

most of us can't remember sh!t about what you've done before.

http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1367161001/0#0

Hello everyone, so I finally had some time to work on my Savage and to try and get it started. I found some starter fluid and on the third try it finally kicked over! It fired up but as soon as I gave it a little bit of throttle (nothing dramatic, just a slow roll of the throttle), oil burst out from under the gas tank. Well I shut it down, sat on my shop stool, and thought about what could have caused that. At first, I thought I blew a head gasket because I heard that happens with the Savage eventually. So I emptied the gas out and pulled the tank off, thats when I noticed the tube coming from the right hand side of the top of the engine. The oil that burst out seemed to be coming from that, which I figure is probably less of a problem than a blown head gasket. So my question is: what is this tube? Did I over fill it and this is just the excess oil getting purged from the system? Thanks guys!

The tube Justin is talking about is called the huff tube and it runs up then over and then down to the air box.   It is a large hose that is intended to allow the engine to move air around as the piston goes up and down (a pressure relief and a suction source, because both will happen with each piston stroke).

If it was unplugged at the engine mount point, then yes you can blow oil mist all over the underside of the gas tank.

Issue with a great amount of liquid oil blown everywhere is that there shouldn't BE that much oil in your engine to allow that, which is why folks are asking you to check on some other things.  They are trying to see if you got gasoline into your oil (which bulks up the volume a lot) and they are trying to get you to look into that as a separate issue.

I realize you just put on a Raptor, so you may be dealing with a pre-existing condition from the old vac petcock.   Still, where is your oil level in the sight glass and does it smell like gasoline when you open the fill plug and take a sniff at it.

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Check and make sure you can blow freely through the huff tube before you put it back on again.  If you put the huff tube back on and it blows itself off again (it has a spring clamp on it,BTW) and it is free and open, you may have got some bigger issues -- a compression test might be in order then.

And I agree with Justin, blowing head gaskets NEVER happens on a Savage, although we have had crooked thieving stealership repair persons try to sell newbies head gasket teardown repair jobs quite frequently.  

(they love a $600 total engine tear down job, they do)

Have you been talking to a stealership repair person by any chance?

I DID talk to a dealership here in town, and he did say the head gasket fails a lot. So thank you for telling me that!

Oh heck no, I called just to talk to them. I never took it anywhere, Ive done all the work on it so far myself. I didnt cut the tube but the friend that I got it from told me he cut it when I told him about this last night

So, go buy some rubber tubing of the proper internal diameter, run it UP under the tank then over behind the engine then back down the vertical tube behind the engine and let it end in the little filter somewhere that has a straight shot to the pavement that isn't in line with your rear tire (don't want any oil on your tire, really).  

Remember the UP, then over and then down -- the oil mist needs collect in the up portion so it can run back down the tube back inside the engine or you will lose some oil out that huff tube, enough to make you add more oil more frequently than you would otherwise.

How about a little catch bottle on the end of the hose, to be emptied each service? Vented to atmosphere of course. An aluminium pot from a touchup gun would look cool. And save worrying about oil going on the tyre?.
The stealerships can be pretty rough, the liars. Took some ducati heads to my local (now Out Of Business) for a valve clearance adjustment while the engine was out for Other Work. A couple years later took the whole bike back for a health checkup. "Oh wow, your valve clearances are terrible. Lucky you brought it in, it wouldn't lasted much longer". They were a bit embarrassed when I reminded them it was them that did the job last, and it had only done maybe 4000km since last (they're good for 20,000 between adjusting if you be nice).